28.02.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 35

At the same time it is possible to read Joey the mechanical boy as a matter of (a particular course) as “exactly what you would expect” from late industrial capitalism. Not only because, as Canguilhem and Deleule argue, the machinic and the human are historically inseparable because “machines can be considered as organs of the human species (Canguilhem, 55) but because “what else” could a flow of signs that include Taylorism, Popular Mechanics, Turing machines, the space program, WW2, nuclear weapons, and “stream-lined” kitchens, produce but ...

+++ You have been disconnected. Do you wish to reconnect? <Julu> perfect love is always interruption. <Alan> cut my nipples from my breasts: plant them. @cut @plant @grow Soldiers of the Golden Fleece <Julu> and they have black bellies of black bombers cut into straight and rigid angles and just so reflecting radar everywhere across your body’s violent hills. @havoc - @#$@^&$)(%$(*&#$%& [noise is on the line] +++ You have been disconnected. Do you wish to reconnect? @love ===== (so much for nostalgia or plotting the poem in advance)

beep. beep. probable passage of clarity maintainted [sic] by subliminal direction of message through cortical centres. verbal wipeout! verbal wipeout! internal criticism of structure to maintain balance will now be established. all readers will fashion seatbelts and fasten. FASCINATION! FASCIST NATIONS! predicated police control of sentence structure to conceal emotion, justifiable paranoia in face of anti-matter actions towards ... WIPEOUT! WIPEOUT! wondering where the surplus would come from, wondering what the surplus was, the theory of note blacking and line worrying was celebrating a thousand years of bursting, it was already there as something else from someplace else,

always,

the only laws I don’t dismiss: love your neighbor, puff puff pass. And dand. “Hi again,” he wrote. “Perhaps I did not describe my question clearly: Have you used this starter before? I wanted to ask about the taste of the resulting bread.” And h dand. Bumpted. Peat in the sky — viper’s crisp. Which takes us to a central question about Iron Moon. Is this poetry that happens to be about migrant labor or a manifesto about migrant labor that happens to take the form of poetry? This is, of course, a schematic way of putting things, for the argument’s sake. And reading the book — and watching the film, to which we will turn below — will hardly move anyone to simply tick one of the boxes. To be sure, Qin’s introduction and Goodman’s afterword are more about migrant labor than about poetry. But why shouldn’t a poetry anthology be socio-politically motivated, and why shouldn’t its makers say that it is? There is, for instance, Xie Xiangnan “Work Accident Joint Investigative Report” — a kind of found poetry, almost a ready-made — on a factory worker whose finger is severed by a die-cutting machine. Her name, work number, and other details are duly supplied. And Xu Lizhi’s

I swallowed an iron moon they called it a screw I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms bent over machines, our youth died young

So what are pyroglyphs? Flames, sparks, combustions, scorch marks, the many-hued glow of fevered metals ... a vise crushing a timber, a stack of books ... a voice we thought we’d never forget ... In PYROGLYPHS, fifteen (or eighteen) monitors (at first I read “monsters”) are arranged in a circle on the floor facing up and inward at a 30-degree angle ... Poor thing, one says, did you see the fear in her at 4:54? But that is a different video. In this video, the famous Egyptian bellydancer Fifi Abdo dances up against the camera, on a table, the long room of revelers and revelers’ limbs behind her. Their arms looks like snakes. Fifi Abdo rolls around on what seems to be a blue table. A child rises from the carpeted floor. She reaches into the air, then hugs her own body, then bends her arms above her head. Behind her is the screen of a television which shows nothing but the color blue. Also behind this child is an empty pink doll buggy. A stout, faceless figure in a gray bathrobe quickly moves past the open door. Another dancer is bending at the waist: she is hopping and flapping again, her arms extended like wings. Sort of. If they are wings, they are the wings of a flightless bird. On the television screen a photo floats, then diminishes: the photo on the television is of an empty apartment’s interior (this apartment), then a woman (this dancer), pointing a finger or crossing her arms. There’s a man ... He wears a thick gold necklace. Like all photos on this television, he disappears. On the shelves are cans of vegetables. On the shelves are small plastic cups filled with fruit. Thus, for example, the image accompanying plate 10 of America (a devilish youth rising in flames from the bottom of the page) seems to fit much more closely with the speech in plate 6 (“The terror answerd: I am Orc”) than with the text that appears in plate 10 itself (“Thus wept the Angel’s voice”) — which actually seems a much closer fit with the image in plate 6. Which is to say that it turns out, with enough McDonald’s sausage patties, your ass become a piñata full of flaming snakes. From here Araki travels by train to Ginza, and after a few photographs, he is on back on the subway headed northeast to Kita-Senju, where his wife, Yoko Araki, was born and raised. On foot he cuts south to nearby Minami-Senju, then goes little further down a street which takes him into his own neighborhood of Minowa in east Tokyo. Following a quick lunch — he snaps a couple finishing up their soba, the man looking off to the side — he waits again on another station platform and catches another train — this time to the neighborhood of Kagurazaka, where his small office and darkroom were located at the time. After a few photos along the shop-lined hill for which the area is named, he heads to the next location. While all of the other transitions in the book are illustrated with literal images of transportation, a pair of butterflies floating above act as the jump into the next section: Tokyo’s vibrant Shinjuku district. Shinjuku is a hub of commuters, shopping, and nightlife. Araki would explore Shinjuku nights a decade later with Tokyo Lucky Hole. In the backgrounds we find references to other coordinates from Araki’s world: Kinokuniya Bookstore, for example, where Sentimental Journey was first put on the shelves, a sign for DUG, his favorite jazz bar. The final quarter of the book takes the viewer to a cheap theme park in Asakusa, and afterward to an all-girl revue with short-skirted cancan girls. Finally, leaving the theater, Araki is back on the streets, then onto another subway platform, and finally back on the train headed home. If at first glance the pictures appear to lack the action or form typically idealized in street photography, viewers who look a little harder will be rewarded with captivating details. Within a single frame it’s easy to spot several things that would have excited Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand, but Araki was doing something else: working with the feeling of the city instead of recording its characters. Making a plain picture is easy; making a memorable one with a Winogrand “punch” a bit harder, but taking the Atget route is perhaps the most difficult of all ... Or not. Imagine that you died, your entrails are yanked out and bathed. Then you are ground up and stuffed into those intestines. I’m not a vegetarian but it’s useful to think this way to understand the atmosphere of the Baroque. And fittingly, the same night we were looking at Nathalie Djurberg’s work, we also came upon a video of large brown turds, inflatable ones by Paul McCarthy swaying in a public park in Utrecht. The raid yielded no significant intelligence, US officials told NBC News on Monday. Earlier this month, however, Pentagon officials said it produced “actionable intelligence.” So, too, did White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who initially called the raid “highly successful.” OK. Call me Ishmael. Sing the whole of the song that includes the line, “All that could not sink or swim was just left there to float.”

That is the way things happen; for ever and ever Plum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall covers The cries of the whipped and the sighs of the lovers And the hard bright light composes A meaningless moment into an eternal fact Which a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile ...

to _dance_ the archive /\ archive the dance: subaltern forms shifting screens a / \ a consequence of broken frames it is at the inter- / \-secting of the two: the lozenge it is at the inter- \ /-secting of the two: the lozenge shifting screens a \ / a consequence of broken frames to _dance_ the archive \/ archive the dance: subaltern forms

Then the gods gather in great whirlwinds. They gather at the boundary and look across. They see whatever may be absent but it is beyond their reach; they have no arms and legs and their voices do not carry them farther. Vast cataclysms of orange energy sweep from their hungry faces. They speak unknown languages and even I do not know their languages. I did not know nor ask why they are gods. Now there are questions framed by the whirlwind and the boundary. The sky here has no energy. Or rather is all energy, parceled by lines determined by a metric space. It is spectral blue. Sometimes at night arms and legs of kami push out through my skin, distort me. Painful partial births; in the morning I look and see nothing ... But language, that is Western culture, was more than some recumbent artifact to be used or not as the intelligentsia saw fit. Its place in their lives had been established long before they found the means of mastering it. Indeed, they were themselves in part defined by those languages of rule and commerce. In Frantz Fanon’s poetic description, they were Black skins under white masks. CLR James has quite effectively captured this contradiction: Césaire and I were talking one day, and I asked him: “Where do you come from?” He said, “Well I grew up in Martinique [and went to] the Victor Schoelscher school.” So I said: “What did you do there?” He told me: “Latin and Greek and French literature.” And I said: “What next?” He said, “I went to France, and I went to the Ecole Normale Superieure.” I said, “Yes I know that school. It is famous for producing scholars and Communists.” (Césaire was one of the first in each department: he was one of the finest scholars and he was a notable Communist.) And I said: “What did you do there?” And he said: “Latin and Greek and French literature.” And then I said: “Where did you go from there?” And he said: “I went to the Sorbonne.” And I said, “I suppose you did there Latin and Greek and French Literature?” And he said: “Exactly.” He said, “But there is one thing more.” And I asked: “What is that?” He said, “I went back to teach in Martinique, and I went to the Victor Schoelscher school, and there I taught Latin and Greek and French literature.” So when Césaire wrote his tremendous attack upon Western civilization, In Return to My Native Land, and said that Négritude was a statement for some concepts of civilization which the Black people had and which would be important in any development of civilization away from capitalist society, he was able to make this ferocious attack upon Western civilization because he knew it inside out ... He had spent some twenty years studying it.